To the Wonder

In your moviegoing life, you will probably never see such a juxtaposition of cinematic genius and ineptitude, of godlike intuition and cluelessness, of beauty and ridiculousness as you'll find in "To the Wonder." Watch it with one eye, and it's a masterpiece; with another, it's a joke. With both eyes, it's simply confounding - but the one thing it's not is a success. Bend yourself into contortions and look away from every flaw, praise its insight and originality, and yet even then, you would not inflict this on a friend. At least not one you want to keep.

Director Terrence Malick is after something worthwhile in "To the Wonder." He has made a film about love and its mystery - about divine love and its human offshoots - a subject so huge and consequential, and so requiring of reverence and rigorous honesty that conventional narrative must have seemed inadequate to him.

Unwilling to cheapen the subject with the usual cliches of movie storytelling, Malick invents entirely new ways to tell this story, and in the process he creates moments of sublime inspiration that are breathtaking and that can only be Malick. Yet the great irony of "To the Wonder" is that, in avoiding one set of cliches, Malick stumbles into others, gets stuck in them and can't get out.

Instead of specific characters, he gives us stand-ins for humanity that are as thin as cellophane. His lead actress does nothing but twirl. Literally, in scene after scene, Olga Kurylenko expresses joy and every other emotion by extending her arms and twirling. Do not - repeat, do not - participate in any drinking game involving Kurylenko and twirling, or you'll be in a coma before the movie is half over. Then again, just watching "To the Wonder" you might be in a coma by then anyway.

Malick takes vivid actors and turns them into zombies. I don't think I've ever seen actors looking so miserable, so lost and uncomfortable on screen as do Kurylenko, Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams. They get to do nothing but stand around. Affleck lurks and reflects, Kurylenko twirls and gambols, and McAdams strains and represses her heretofore irrepressible personality. Once or twice, she tries to twirl, but her heart isn't in it.

There are snippets of conversation throughout the film, but these are rare. Mostly, we see images accompanied by voice-over, a technique Malick employed, though to a lesser degree, in previous films such as "The New World" and "The Tree of Life."

Here, if Malick wants to show two people arguing, he will show them arguing, but we'll hear a voice-over of someone reflecting on the argument. This has an interesting effect, as if to say it doesn't matter what the people are saying, that rather we should be concerned with the human tendency toward conflict, as a universal condition.

At the start of "To the Wonder," we first hear Marina (Kurylenko), ruminating about her private feelings, as onscreen we see her and Neil (Affleck), an American, pursuing a relationship in France. Their courtship includes a visit to the monastery Mont St.-Michel, also known as "The Wonder." Neil doesn't want to get married, but he asks Marina and her daughter to come live with him in the United States. Alas, Neil lives in the flattest and most barren part of Oklahoma, and no amount of joyful twirling can turn that into a rich cultural environment, nor stave off a growing sense of dislocation.

Meanwhile, Javier Bardem is a Spanish priest in Oklahoma, and his voice-overs reveal a crisis of faith. We see him going about his rounds, attending to drug addicts and convicts - Malick finds some amazing faces for these roles, clearly nonactors. In these first minutes, indeed for the first half hour, Malick seems to be tapping into an eternal sadness and restlessness. He is on his way to creating a classic.

Then slowly, ever so slowly, things go wrong. It's as if Malick, knowing he was going to present these characters from a distance, only built their facades. Instead of creating characters of detail and specificity, he went for the shorthand of attempting archetypes, and he ended up with nothing. With the exception of the priest character, these figures are too weak to hold up a universal frame, and too vague to be of concern or interest. They become irritating, then insipid, then ludicrous.

Even with that, there are moments. With Malick, there always are. He has a way of bringing together images in ways that light up feelings and ideas, of moving his camera into one setting and seamlessly continuing that motion into another so that precious and indefinable connections are made. He is still one of the greatest filmmakers alive, the greatest American filmmaker, in my opinion. And a case could be made that even the very worst film by a great filmmaker is worth seeing.

But that's the best that could be said for "To the Wonder" - and I wouldn't say it.